Here is the overview of the course and event. Gory details can be found here.

Speakers include: Eric Ries (founder of the lean startup movement), Dave McClure (the foul-mouthed, opinionated, and obnoxiously right-most-of-the-time angel), the KISS metrics team, Randy Komisar (VC/angel with Kleiner Perkins and author of my favourite book on venture capital – The Monk and the Riddle), Steve Blank (who recently wrote a fantastic blog post called “No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers” and many others. This is a top-tier collection of speakers.

This is going to be a kick-in-the-ass day that is going to make any startup entrepreneur rethink their entire business approach.So if you’re sick of limping along building your business 10 users at a time or “working to get the app just right before we launch”, get yourself and your team down to this event.

Sign up HERE. This event is $700USD in person. We’re providing the simulcast here for $50 FREE. Do it. You won’t regret it. And you’ll get to hang out and meet a bunch of other startup entrepreneurs who are all building their ventures. Great place to connect with like-minded folks.

I’ve excerpted the beginning below. Click here for the full speech transcript over on Care2.com.

You were born to save the planet.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and it has all been leading up to you.  4.4 million years ago an ancestor we now call ARDI roamed the land of Ethiopia, and her life was leading up to you.  The last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, thawed, leaving the redwood forests to our North, and all of this was leading up to you.  The Earth needs you right now.

Your generation was born to save the planet.

Have you ever wondered when things started going wrong?  Our ecological systems are in decline, one-third of fish species stand at the verge of collapse, the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide drinking water to over a billion people, are rapidly melting, the chemicals we’re putting in us, on us and around us are forming complex endocrine disrupting compounds that are in every one of our bodies.  Every mother who is breastfeeding in America today is probably passing a man-made chemical to their child.   There’s something fundamentally wrong when mothers need to worry about chemicals that they’re passing to their children.

We’re born with better sense than that. You learn basic rules in kindergarten. Don’t break your friend’s toys.  Share. Wait in line. Don’t hurt anybody. Robert Fulghum wrote a little book called All I Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten.   But then we grow up.  We forget all of that.  The plague of Middle School is visited upon us.  We get focused on soccer practice.  And bands.  And ballet.  And sex. And STAR tests.  And SATs. And college.

I actually want to write a sequel to Fulghum’s book.  We could call it:  All I Need to Forget I learned in Middle School.

Whenever it started, the bad news seems to keep on coming.

Ten months ago the last wild jaguar in the United States was killed.  The last one. They called it Macho B.  Biologists had been seeing Macho B for years. The Arizona Department of Game and Fish killed it accidentally in a bungled attempt to save it, because the Federal Government had refused to give the jaguar Endangered Species Protection.

This is happening in your lifetimes.  This isn’t something you need to wait for a Kens Burns Documentary to hear about, the crash in biodiversity in our last wild places is happening now.

Click here to read the rest.

I haven’t outsourced my inbox yet like Tim Ferriss has. I still do it myself. So every time I hit Inbox Zero, I thank my friend Alex Samuel from Social Signal for her tweeting about her own inbox zero success. I used to have 3000+ emails in my inbox and another 20,000 somewhere in the archive. I finally found a way to clear it. It requires Gmail, a to-do list of some kind and Gmail’s awesome keyboard shortcuts, and some Apple keyboard shortcuts.

Ensure you already have a good to-do list manager of some kind, that you can use to sort and prioritize tasks. I use a basic google sheet in a dedicated Site-specific browser too called Fluid (so it looks like a desktop app and it has an icon in my dock), but you can use anything. The keys to success are in these principles:

• Email is not a to-do list. Period. Get tasks out of there.
• Archiving = peace of mind. I never really understood the value of archiving until I realized that it is a way to file…without the psychological overhead of filing. It is a way of saying “get this out of my inbox and put it away in case I need it again.)
• The important thing is to either archive, action/archive, or put on list/archive everything.
• Eliminate (in this case archive) everything you don’t need to action as fast as you can
• Delegate (with short emails) nything you can as fast and succinctly as possible)
• Put tasks into the task list, then come back and keep sifting.

So once you have your crazy full inbox and your to-do list:

1. Go to the oldest email in your inbox and open it.
2. Scan the contents and using standard GTD thinking, do one of the following:
   1. Task?
      1. Command-Tab to your task list
      2. add the task as an ABC or to-delegate item
      3. Command-tab back
      4. hit the magic “]” key.  (<- This archives the message and takes you to the next most current email.)
   2. <2 minute action?
      1. Command-tab to app to take action. If you need to send an email and don’t want to lose your spot in the email inbox in Gmail, hold SHIFT and then hit COMPOSE NEW MESSAGE. It will pop open a window on top. When you’re done and have sent it, the window will close, leaving you right where you were before.
      2. Take action. If that means writing an email, do it in five sentences or less.
      3. Command-Tab back to Gmail if necessary.
      4. Hit the magic “]” key to archive the message.
   3. Archivable? No action required?
      1. Archive and next with “]” key.
3. Repeat as fast as possible until Inbox Zero.
4. Celebrate.

The beauty of the ] key and the command-tab and the shift-compose is that with a few keystrokes, you can can clear hundreds or even thousands of messages in a few hours. My first pass? I cleared 3000 messages in a few hours. It can be done. And when I was done, I had a complete list of all of my tasks again. I wasn’t living with some tasks in email and others in a to-do list which is always a recipe for lack of prioritization anyway.

Have you hit inbox zero? How do you handle it? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear it.

Congratulations to everybody who came out. Check out the full race report.

Note: Blue the dog and I didn’t do the 50, we did our own custom length of 24k and ended up at Delaney’s for a mocha to warm up from the rain and wind!

I just heard today that you’re gone. Sorry to hear that mate. I enjoyed working out with you at Crossfit Vancouver. We called you “Nutts” for short because you were a big dumb-ass, always clowning around, but you always worked your ass off too.  We were sad to see you go but knew you had to go find something important to do with your life.

I like the official photo. You cleaned up nice. I noticed that you managed to sneak in that sly grin of yours even on an official pic.

Good luck where ever you are Andy. I know your crew in the military and your family and your crossfit family will miss you.

The CBC article is below:

CBC News – British Columbia – Military procession to honour B.C. soldier killed in Afghanistan.

I thought it seemed appropriate to write Jeffrey a good-bye note here. I couldn’t write it yesterday as I had too many things going on in my head so here it is:

-

Dear Jeffrey:

Well, that damned cancer finally caught you. That’s rotten. I knew something was up when I saw MCB’s facebook posting a couple of days ago and then Jeff Clavier’s comment yesterday. Of course that led me to the lovely “Goodbye Jeffrey” post that your family posted on your blog which was really just perfect. I’ve never met Jessy, Brittany, or Mac but since they were your family, they must be cool. I’m sending them my hugs from afar.

Reading the comments over on that blog post made me think back to when I met you and the various interactions I have had with you over the past few years. I’m not sure if you remember but you and I first met in January 2007. I had just posted a blog post about wikis and you had responded, thoughtfully and with gratefulness for the positive comments and for the criticisms that would make your company better. I remember meeting you shortly thereafter at some industry event and as we both skimmed each other’s name tags and recognition registered on both of our faces, we both lit up as we remembered our recent exchange. I remember that moment so clearly. I remember thinking as we spoke, “this one is different.” You spoke passionately about Atlassian but also about music and blogging and building businesses and connecting people. I wasn’t meeting The President of Atlassian, I was meeting Jeffrey Walker, renaissance man, who played music, blogged, hacked, and was also the leader of a great little startup company.

I regret that we never got to spend a lot of time along the way although we would cross paths at the various enterprise 2.0 conferences and I would always feel like I was catching up with the old friend I never really made, if that makes any sense. I was always happy to see you anywhere we met up because you were just so darned friendly and authentic in the way you communicated and connected. I got to know you through your writing more than time spent together and then our paths diverged for a long while. When they reconnected, I learned about all of your trials with cancer and the impact that your writing had had on so many others. That prompted our final brief email discussion about this last round and how you were heading into it the same way you had the others, head held high, nice clothes on, new sunglasses on the head, and guitar in hand. And yes, that picture of you in the hospital in your cool new shirt and sunglasses does make you look bad-ass. I love it.

Then in a blink you were gone and we’re all now trying to figure out what that means and what to do with the hole you have left in so many different communities: your family, your Atlassian family, the greater Atlassian community, the Enterprise 2.0 community, the blogging community, the music community, and the entrepreneurial community. I know you will be missed in all of them.

Well, I for one am done with mourning and am moving on to celebrating and acting. You’ll be with me when I’m attending a conference and talking to my 200th (or 500th!) person and I remember that the most important thing I can do is be authentic and interested in them and in the world around us. I’ll also think of you when I continue to work on things I love with people whose company I enjoy,  and I will think of you when I put that work down for the day to go spend time doing other things I love to do like my sports and playing outside, remembering that work and family and creativity and friends all need to be blended together, just like your life and your blog.

Jeffrey, we didn’t spend enough time together but I want you to know that you had an impact from afar and that I’ll miss you and not forget you. I expect that where ever you are, you’re getting to play on an even larger stage, hack the universe and not just computers, and continue to build community. With any luck you’re up on some stage, jamming with the greats.

Rock on brother.

Part 1
Part 2

I have been thinking about this a lot as I’m currently living in Canada, but working with two clients in the U.S. For the most part, because so many teams are distributed, including their client’s teams, there is no “there” to go to, even if I did want to fly somewhere. The only way to have a “there” is if we all meet in the middle somewhere. So I might as well live in the country side surrounded by fresh air, mountains, stream, squirrels, and birds or go live in Costa Rica for a month as be in an office park in Silicon Valley. I have to say…I’m all for this.

Cool talk. Worth watching. Great job Seth. Good tribe-finding and leading yourself!

January 21, 2009 | 6:30 – 8:30PM

Moderator:

• Mark Sherman, General Partner, Battery Ventures

Speakers:

• Seth Sternberg, CEO, Meebo

• Auren Hoffman, CEO, Rapleaf

• Eric Ries, KPCB and former CTO, IMVU

• Munjal Shah, CEO, Like.com

• Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO, Echosign

NOTES:

• Jason Lemkin

  • He built:

    • Babycenter:

    • Nanotech co: 100 meetings to get funded

    • Echosign: Founded in 2005; 18 people, 10,000 customer, grabbed $8M (“the balance of which is still in the bank.”)

  • Takeaway – get Really really focussed and kill anything that’s not working as fast as you can.

• Munjal Shah:

  • Take-away: skip the “what can we take away from the budget approach” and go for zerto based budgeting where you start with nothing and then ask, “what is the stuff we absolutely need to have.” It gives you a better result. It’s harder but better

• Seth/Meebo:

  • have raised $37.5M up to C.

  • raised after they had traction;

  • doing 40M uniques/mo

  • Take-away: we focused on having a founding team that could build a product without having to pay anybody Hire SLOW, not fast.

• Eric Ries / ImVu

  • founded in 2004;

  • we sell virtual cllothes for avatars;

  • Eric is now with Kleiner as a venture advisor after building three startups

  • Take-away: runway is not the issue; the issue is how many more iterations can you do? Don’t just do the same X iterations slower. That’s stupid.

• Auren Hoffman / Rapleaf:

  • shareholder in 29 companies including Meebo;

  • Take-away that is non-obvious: when you get a term sheet from a VC, the beest clause to negotiate to cut your costs is your investors’s counsel’s fees. Cut that down to $zero or $10K

• Mark Sherman / Battery Ventures

  • 30 years in business;

  • have taken 8 companies public (2005-2008) like Omniture, Netezza, BlaeLogic, sold another 6 companies;

  • sold an unmanned aeuronautical vehicle to Beoing for $400M

  • Key Takeaway: the world of vc has changed fundamentally and will reset things for the next 3-5 years. The number of firms and dollars will decline. So be as capital efficient as you can. Every dollar now counts.

• Seth:

  • Build cheaply. When you take on capital, your company will grind to a halt because you have to stop working and start hiring and giving powerpoints to your investors.

  • Get Traction first!!! Then add money. Money does not bring traction:

• Munjal Shah:

  • “Eat appetizers when they’re there, not when you’re hungry. If the money is avaialable and raisable, do it. Always.

  • They always want to give you money when you don’t need it and never want to give you money when you need it.

  • Don’t overcapitalize. But raise it when you can.

  • All companies fail for the same reason – running out of cash. Don’t run out of cash.

• QUESTION: What are the advantages/disadvantages of raising money today?

  • Eric:

    • really good deals are still being done.

    • There is no way for people to walk in with a bplan and walk out with cash.

    • Tough enviironments force you to really sharpen your plan.

    • Do your investors think that you can create value or

    • Raise money when you don’t have to (cuz that’ swhen it’s available.)

    • We tried to get off the multi-round treadmill (how will we get to the milestones so we can raise ANOTHER round????) and think instead of “how do we use this round to get to profitability.

  • Mark Sherman:

    • There is a lot of talent out there right now that you can tap for free product development. They’re working at boring big co and want a side project.

    • Check out the viability of the firm you’re dealing with since the venture firms are collapsing.

  • Jason Lemkin:

    • It’s the wrong question. The right question is “what’s your business model? and do you need venture funds in order to actually succeed?”

    • [I agree with that. Advantage and disadvantage is subjective.]

    • There are few companies that REALLY make sense as venture funded plays.

    • If you DO have to raise it, do it as late as you can in the lifecycle of your company.

    • Get it out and do it until you’re breaking things significantly so that you now how big that business can scale.

    • You might be better off running your business and just banking the cash in your jeans.

  • Mark Sherman:

    • We have found that the more we give early stage businesses, the less successful they are at exit. The less we give, the more successful they are.

• What can you suggest to people?

  • Auren/Rapleaf::

    • 3 things that make sense right now

      • B2B: Products that the CFO likes that help them make savings or help him make money

      • B2B: help companies sell more stuff to their current consumers;

      • B2C: diapers.com. Simple focussed and

  • Munjal::

    • DO NOT DO SALARY CUTS. It breaks an implicit contract.

    • Cut one person before cutting everybody.

    • Cut the full person and pay your others full fare.

• Question: I just raised money in October 2008. I have some opportunity to bring on more.

  • Rapleaf guy:

    • we do significantly serious reference checks (criminal, debt, civil, an everything else.). We go DEEP.

  • Jason Lemkin:

    • get the money now. Get it because we’re probably heading into nuclear winter.

  • Eric Ries:

    • Pull your moment in time forward when you start asking people to buy your product.

    • Don’t wait to learn that information.

    • You can sell your alpha TODAY to people even if it’s only half-built.

• Question:: which expenses would you target for cost-cutting?

  • Seth/Meebo:

    • wedecided not to build a second data center on the east coast.

    • Service providers just stack up. quickly. REview and cut them.

    • Pre-empt future hires. Do not hire more people if you can avoid it.

  • Jason:

    • Avoid PR firms

    • Minimize office space

    • Do NOT cut your core sales and marketing engine. It takes 18 months to build up again.

  • Q: Anybody renegotiated a lease?

    • Munjal: In 2000,

      • Our lessor went bankrupt. We stopped paying them. It was caught in bankruptcy court.

      • You think that people will come after you but they won’t.

      • RENEGOTIATE. It’s better to do that.

      • Don’t cut your people.

      • Cut your overhead costs.

      • At Like.com, we always “hire the best and pay the best. (in cash and/or equity.)

      • But we hire less people than you might have in other cases. We make our teams work really really hard as a result.

      • Our teams are understaffed on purpose.

    • Mark Sherman:

      • One of the mistakes I see with our smaller companies is that they overinvest in their spaces. / real estate.

    • Jason Lemkin:

      • YES – monitor your landlord

      • I have been through two renegotiations.

      • If you default on your lease, they can get a full judgement agaisnst the full amount

      • Go to your landlord with your balance sheet and and model.

      • Show them how they will make more money

    • Mark Sherman:

      • Do a zero-based org chart on top of just zero based budgetin

      • Start fresh. Figure out what’s critical. from a blank sheet. to get as much ramp as you can.

    • Auren:

      • If you have a 15 person team, you should have no more than a CEO and 2 VPs.

  • Q: During this time, should companies be tweaking their busines model?

    • Eric: if it’s already successful, no.

    • If you haven’t validated your model, sure.

    • Get more efficient wit your existin gteam.

  • Q: My point was that sometimes harsh times can make you realize that your model just sucks. I watched a client/server company go from client/server to SaaS and now the’re a 1.5B/yr company. Nextag was another great examle.

  • Sales

    • Jason Lemkin: We made our existing sales teams go from base + commission to 100% commission.

    • Sales and marketing people BOTH should be paid only on bringing in revenue

  • Gadi:

    • GO TALK TO YOUR CLIENTS

  • Question: Have any of you gone back to your customer?

    • Manjal: we built a microsite that ONLY shows stuff on sale. That is the only stuff that is now selling. And the conversion rates are much better than on the original site.

    • The key to being able to change your business model is having low-denial.

    • Get over it.

    • The smartest guys in the biggest bank in te country didn’t know what happened either.

    • Be interested in being successful more than you’re interested in other stuff like “following through, being right, or other concepts.”

    • I used to meeet with a group. All of them went bannkrupt – all 15.

    • Get out of denial. Fail Fast. Shut down fast if you have to. Restart fast.

    • 10 guys went and got jobs. 5 built new businesses, each of which went on to generate at least $5M/year. The earlier they got out and started building anew, the better they are doing now.

    • Seth: As long as you’re generating results for your own customers, they will continue to pay and may even pay MORE nowadays.

  • Mark: One of my portfolio companies had planned for significant growth. One of my companies turned away a 1.8M deal that was going to take them off-path I was happy to see them staying focused on THEIR plan.

• Question: What metrics are you using and is that changing?

  • Seth/Meebo:: we use number of uniques/property; uniques/daily across all Meebo properties; how many impressions we can push to their users; bottom line revenue;

  • Eric: gross revenue; profitability; ROI (expected and actual); acquisition cost per customer; lifetime value per customer (is A>B in this channel?); “most people do not do this work and use proxies instead

  • Auren: too many metrics are really bad; most companies have way too many; your product is probably the most thing

  • Jason Lemkin: our metrics changed radically from (whatever) to 2009 (profitability is my only new metric.) Begin forced to subscribe to a bunch of SaaS metrics who created them was beyond frustrating. Refreshingly, we’re back to bottom line only.

  • Munjal: profitability and cash are all that matter in 2009 and cash-burrn. We have enough cash on hand to run for five years if we want. We do a LOT of A/B testing. ALL of your testing must be parallel A/B testing (where every second users gets the optional difference.). We A/B every site change on 10% of our base. If it is not better than the prior version, it does not go live. We literally instrument every single change. We produce less featurres (like 60 of them) vs competitors (who may release 100) but they’re all heavily instrumented and that is how we can KNOW what works.

  • ****the biggest waste on earth is building code that nobdy wants or that you can’t measure to see if it ever moved the needle

  • Seth: We put fake features on the site and then watch for click-throughs. Onc ethey click on it, we tell them it was a test. Taht saves a TON of development work.

  • Auren: Test EVERYTHING. Assume NOTHING. The worst marketing person is the one who knows what the user wants. You want a marketing person who teases out the user wants not assumes them.

• Summary::

  • Flat is the new up.

  • Not getting a bail-out is the new up.

  • Move sales to incentive based 100%

  • Cut non S&M costs like overhead

  • Talk to your clients about how to drive more revnue with them or help THEM drive additional revenue from THEIR customers.

Image via Wikipedia

Wow. I went to see MILK tonight at the Castro Theatre on Castro Street in San Francisco tonight. What an incredibly well done and powerful movie. It tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States.

It was incredible to be at ground zero for this story, in the same Castro Theatre that you see in the movie, to walk out the door to walk up the street where these events took place and where 30,000-40,000 people marched in silent vigil the night that Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered.

Given that it is Thanksgiving, I choose to use today to give thanks to those who have come before me in the gay community who have fought and struggled and been beaten and disrespected and who continued to hold their heads high, claim their place in the world, and say, “we will not be quiet and we will not go along to get along.”

Here we are thirty years later and the instead of Anita Bryant trying to take away civil rights, we now have the Church of the Latter Day Saints spending money and influencing voting to take away marriage rights from gays. Milk fought Prop 6. We just lost Prop 8. The names will change, and the battles will continue because as Martin Luther King said: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

So for Thanksgiving today, I’m going to say thanks to those people who have fought and who continue to fight. I’m going to thank all the people who came before me who have made it easy for those who came later to be truly themselves in the world.  I came out in the 1990′s. It was very easy for me because of the struggles of those people in the past. I know that my life would have been very different had I been born a few years earlier and I owe you all a debt of gratitude I can never repay. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

“
“The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” (Timothy Ferris)

I recently had reason to head to Paris for personal reasons. I thought I would use the trip as an opportunity to try working somewhere other than Vancouver – to see if it’s really possible to relocate and still work? Of course, in Ferriss’ world, you only work 4 hours a week. Unfortunately I didn’t get to experience THAT part of the plan.

It worked. Here’s how I did it.

I moved all of my landline numbers into a Vonage account about a month prior – personal home phone, company land-line from San Francisco, company land-line from Vancouver – the works. I set up one voicemail box for all of the numbers and forwarded that to Simulscribe which transcribes voicemails to email (and does a pretty darned great job at it). Then I set up the cell to roll-over to the same Simulscribe address.

Once in Paris, I plugged in the phone and Vonage box. And realized that whoops – you can’t plug 110V devices into 220V. I had fried BOTH of them. Or so I thought. It turned out that fortune favours the stupid. One of the plug converters was fried so it never passed any current through.

So I bought some transformers (220V to 110V step down transformers) for my other various chargers, bought a couple of plug converters (for the Apple power supply and the new phone that I bought) and plugged it all in. It took a couple of tries but after a call to Vonage tech support, the Vonage box was up and running on the local DSL connection and voila – my phone was plugged in and ready to receive calls at any of my numbers.

I have to admit that it was freeing (and a bit strange) to have people look at my calling code and say, “OH! You’re in Vancouver!” and then have to explain that no, in fact I was in Paris, ten hours ahead of them! The sound quality was as good as it is in Vancouver, which is to say, on par with the regular plain old telephone lines that I had before.

There was only one glitch and that was more to do with the Siemens phone than anything else. It would ring but only at the moment it was actually ringing, could you hit the “ACCEPT” button. In between rings, it didn’t look “pick up able”. Weird.

But that very small issue aside, it means that with a laptop, skype, Gatherplace (for screen sharing), Simulscribe, a good DSL connection, and a Vonage adapter – have equipment, will travel.

I hear that Puerto Vallarta has good DSL… Or maybe Costa Rica….

Worth reading both articles.

“The trouble with the first time entrepreneur is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. After a failure he does know what he doesn’t know and can beat the hell out of people who still have to learn.”

“All companies that go out of business do so for the same reason – they run out of money.”

“Great markets make great companies.”

“I like opportunities that are addressing markets so big that even the management team can’t get in its way.”

“I am 100% behind my CEOs right up till the day I fire them.”

“The world of technology thrives best when individuals are left alone to be different, creative, and disobedient.”

“One of my jobs as a board member has been to counsel management to avoid distraction and to execute with constructive paranoia.”

All fantastic and useful quotes.

• The best time to start is when you’ve got enough money in the bank to support all contingencies.
• The best time to start is when the competition is far behind in technology, sophistication and market acceptance.
• The best time to start is when the competition isn’t too far behind, because then you’ll spend too long educating the market.
• The best time to start is when everything at home is stable and you can really focus.
• The best time to start is when you’re out of debt.
• The best time to start is when no one is already working on your idea.
• The best time to start is when your patent comes through.
• The best time to start is after you’ve got all your VC funding.
• The best time to start is when the political environment is more friendly than it is now.
• The best time to start is after you’ve got your degree.
• The best time to start is after you’ve worked all the kinks out of your plan.
• The best time to start is when you’re sure it’s going to work.
• The best time to start is after you’ve hired the key marketing person for the new division.
• The best time to start was last year. The best opportunities are already gone.
• The best time to start is before some pundit declares your segment passe. Too late.
• The best time to start is when the new generation of processors is shipping.
• The best time to start is when the geopolitical environment settles down.

Thanks Seth.

Resourcs: Event site, Powerpoint (not yet available)